Ray Blakney
CEO & Co-founder, Live Lingua · 2 appearances on the record.
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Ray Blakney is an entrepreneur and former software engineer who co-founded the online language tutoring platform Live Lingua and created Podcast Hawk. He is known for bootstrapping and scaling multiple location-independent businesses across various industries using lean operational models.
24statements → 5claims → 0claims resolved → 3.88/5average certainty → 1.58/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated →
5 not checkable as stated how the 5 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
5 assertions · 2 opinions · 6 insights · 11 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 5 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 0 are resolved, and 5 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Ray argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
How they sound: not measured why? →
We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Ray Blakney on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Ray Blakney said on We Live to Build that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Blakney: SaaS Sells for 10x to 20x Multiples at Seven Figures
“That's why SAS sells for multipliers of 10, 20 X. If you can get it up to a d seven figure.”
Blakney: Raising weak skills from 20% to 50% beats marginal optimization
“Improving what you're good at. One percent is not gonna make as much difference as improving what you suck at from 20% to 50%.”
Ray Blakney: $500K profit with family time beats making $1M
“Most of us, I think would be perfectly happy with a business that made, you know, 500,000 dollars profit a year, right? You're taking over 500,000, but you could spend all your time with your friends and your family and your kids. We'll be fine. A million woul…”
Blakney: Stigma Leaves the Philippines with Almost No Therapists or Psychiatrists
“In the Philippines, you would, Like, there are almost no therapists and psychiatrists because there's just simply no work because nobody would go to them.”
Blakney: Most Successful CEOs See Therapists but Under 1% Discuss It
“I would be surprised if most successful entrepreneurs or business or CEOs have not seen a therapist or a psychiatrist at some point in their life. I'd be shocked. But I, the number of people who actually talk about it is probably like a fraction of one percent…”
Blakney: Firing underperformers reflects leadership vetting and training failures
“I don't enjoy firing people because part of it's failure on my part, as much as it's probably failure on their part, right? Either I didn't vet them right. I didn't coach them right. I didn't train them right. But for some reason they weren't able to do their …”
Blakney: Paid a Coach Five Figures Monthly for Six Months with Zero Results
“I hired a coach that costs five figures a month for six months and it didn't do crap.”
Blakney: Seven-Figure and Eight-Figure Companies Require Different Playbooks
“What you do with seven figures and what you do in eight figure businesses is different. Right. And this person was focused on like micro changes in the business while we needed bigger, you know, more sweeping changes across the business.”
Blakney: Smart founders bottleneck growth by solving problems ad hoc without systems
“The challenge is we're pretty smart. It means we are able to figure out most things, and we assume everybody else can as well, and that's what holds us back, because when I look at a problem, I never bothered to build a system, because whenever a problem comes…”
Blakney uses 150 foreign contractors so he remains the only official employee
“That being said, we have a 150 people working with us. It's a technicality for the IRS, right? Almost all of my employees are foreigners. So they're contractors, even though they're full-time, we have a leadership team.”
Live Lingua suffered its worst downturn in 15 years and conducted layoffs
“We actually in live link, well, we had one of the biggest down slumps ever we've had in 15 years, about 60 days ago. Right. So I've had to lay some people off recently to kind of keep us on survival level in order to kind of recover.”
Blakney: 120,000 people took LearningStyleQuiz in 12 months with zero monetization
“I realized I had a website learningstylequiz.com where a 100,000 people have taken that quiz in the last 12 months. And I have never monetized it. Like I have no ads. I have like, I don't ask for email addresses. I didn't do a thing. ... Wait, 121 120,000 peop…”
Blakney: Founders must learn mental coping tools before acute stress hits
“These are the kinds of tools that you should have before you're anxious. Right? But trust me, when you're in the middle of stress is not the time to learn how to do these things, right? I mean, you should have these tools in place so that when stress comes, yo…”
Ray Blakney: LiveLingua is the third largest online language school globally
“We own a website called LiveLingua.com, which is the third largest online language school in the world.”
Blakney: International travel creates business opportunities via geographic arbitrage
“So if you're that kind of person, then traveling is amazing, right? Because if you're stuck, so I lived in Ohio for a while, so if you're stuck in Cleveland, Ohio, and you never leave, you might never get exposed to some of these problems, like what you're hav…”
Blakney: LiveLingua took seven years to reach seven figures in revenue
“I joke that if I ever wrote a book, it'd be called Seven Years for Seven Figures and nobody would buy it. That's what it took us. I mean, you know, we built it bit by bit every year. First year was like, 40,000 dollars and we went up to 60,000 dollars, like ab…”
Blakney: LiveLingua saw its biggest spike in March 2020 and sustained it
“So, in that March, we had the biggest spike we've ever had, right? When everybody suddenly, all the restrictions got put in place. You know, if you're looking at the hockey stick, we had like a little hockey stick moment. It's flattened out since then, but it …”
Blakney launched a highly profitable chocolate factory for only $20,000
“My chocolate factory, I started for 20,000 dollars. That's a car. I started a frigging chocolate factory that made me that money back multiple times over for less than, you know, most people spend on the car.”
Blakney acquired the viral site howmuchtoiletpaper.com to test dropshipping
“So I own a website called howmuchtoiletpaper.com. I tried dropshipping with that. Purchased it two years ago because it went viral during COVID. For those of you know, SEO, it had like, it got like 5000 backlinks. We're talking, it was featured on the BBC. Bec…”
Blakney: Combined ventures reach multi-seven-figure annual revenue
“We are kind of eking into the multi seven figure
Range here. So that's combined between all of them.”
Blakney plans to launch a free CBT app monetized through therapists
“And I'll probably build a free app for people to use at some point, because that's what I do. Everything I look at, I'm like, how can I make a business out of this? I'll charge the psychiatrists who put their therapists on there, but people who want to use it …”
Blakney: LiveLingua requires teachers to have learned a second language
“Not only native speakers, they have their college degrees. Most of our teachers have masters, but they also have had to have learned at least one other language.”
Blakney and his wife avoided paying rent or mortgages for ten years
“We have no mortgage. We have no rent. We have not had mortgage or rent for almost 10 years now.”
Blakney: Chinese packaging suppliers reject sub-5,000-unit minimum order quantities
“Getting those boxes for our packaging from China from Shenzhen was a whole other story... We're trying to get somebody to send us like a hundred boxes because we were just starting off. Nobody bakes a hundred boxes in China. Like nobody would even talk to us, …”
Appearances (2)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| 120,000 People Used His Site for Free - He Had No Idea | Aug 6, 2024 | 38m |
| $500K Profit With Time for Family Beats $1M and Misery | Mar 1, 2022 | 30m |